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Washington Law Review

Abstract

The United States has committed to enforce environmental justice in ways it never has before. A spate of new policies aims to increase resources for environmental agencies’ enforcement sections, improve training for environmental enforcement staff, and ensure community engagement in environmental enforcement decision-making. Yet there exists mounting evidence that enforcement of environmental laws happens less frequently and less vigorously in low-income and minoritized communities.

We need to understand why that is happening. Many commentators, opining from a distance, point to insufficient resources for environmental enforcement and legal and political constraints on environmental agencies. While not discounting these reasons, this Article offers a different explanation—one grounded in more than two years of ethnographic observations, interviews, and review of written policies, memoranda, and legislation. Drawing on that research, I interrogate the cultural underpinnings of environmental enforcement as revealed through narratives told by enforcement staff about enforcement purposes and practices. Those narratives construct an ideal of enforcement as an objective, value-neutral practice that often stands at odds with the decisions and actions that would further environmental justice.

Description and analysis of these narratives provide essential insight into how enforcement staff make everyday decisions and how the narratives that guide their decision-making contribute to inequitable enforcement practices. By integrating knowledge and theories from social science and the humanities, the Article expands traditional approaches to environmental enforcement, strengthens interdisciplinary bridges, and contributes to what many scholars have identified as an urgent need to generate more and better knowledge about the bureaucrats who power America’s institutions.

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